That Liminal Space

An update for those who’ve been following my notes about bullying, my ask for prayers that our daughter get a spot in a school that leads with kindness and our current state of waiting:

There’s a particular kind of ache that arrives not with a no, but with a silence.

Not knowing takes its own toll—not just on parents who plan and hope and check inboxes with fingers crossed—but on children who quietly start to wonder if they’re not quite enough.

Our daughter asked, before we hit submit on the application last September, “What do they need to know about me?”

She wrote thoughtfully. Showed up brightly on campus visits. Asked the kinds of questions that reveal not performance, but presence.

And still, we wait.

At first, it was hopeful—the kind of wait that feels like it might give way to something. But now, as the days stretch on, it’s become something else entirely. A liminal state. A fog.

A pause we didn’t ask for.

What we don’t often talk about is how kids internalize this process—not in dramatic, obvious ways, but in quiet cracks that start to form in their sense of belonging.

We reassure them that the admissions process is complicated. That decisions are rarely personal. That sometimes the fit just isn’t right on paper. But they feel the space where certainty should have been.

And in that space, they begin to write stories.

Maybe I didn’t do well on the test.

Maybe I’m not smart enough.

Maybe I didn’t say the right thing.

Maybe they just didn’t like me.

Even the word waitpool carries a strange weight—like being held in suspension, a not-here, not-there kind of place. A place where you’re told you’re worthy but not enough to be chosen. Yet.

And while adults can intellectualize that nuance, children often can’t.

For them, no answer starts to sound like a quiet no. And that silence becomes a mirror.

So as parents, we do the invisible work of holding the line. Of shielding our kids from systems they can’t yet understand. Of finding language that is honest but not heavy. Of reminding them, again and again, that their worth is not contingent on someone else’s timeline, ranking, or rubric.

The unfortunate reality is that we’re carrying our own heartbreak, too.

Sometimes we just want the email to come already. The yes to arrive. The wait to end—not because we need the validation, but because we want to lay down our worry.

To watch our child exhale. To exhale ourselves!

There is no resolution to this piece—because there hasn’t been resolution in real life. Just an open loop.

Just a mother trying to keep the thread of self-trust alive in her child… while she quietly tends to her own.